Sexual Assault: Bill Cosby Found Guilty

American entertainer Bill Cosby found guilty of sexual assault. When law takes it’s place, it respects no man.

A jury has found Bill Cosby guilty on thursday following a drugging and sexually assaulting a woman at his home near 14 years ago, capping the downfall of one of the world’s best-known entertainers, and this brings back to the dozens of women who for years have accused him of similar assaults against them.

On the second day of its deliberations at the Montgomery County Courthouse in this town northwest of Philadelphia, the jury returned to convict Mr. Cosby of three counts of aggravated indecent assault against at Andrea Constand, the time a Temple University employee he had mentored.

It was said that the three counts charge are: penetration with lack of consent, penetration while unconscious and penetration after administering an intoxicant — are felonies, each punishable by up to 10 years in state prison, though the sentences could be served concurrently.

There was a mild drama when the Montgomery County district attorney, Kevin R. Steele, requested for the revoke of Mr. Cosby’s $1 million bail suggesting he had been convicted of a serious crime, owned a plane and could flee and this prompt an angry outburst from Mr. Cosby, who then shouted, “He doesn’t have a plane, you asshole.”

Mr. Cosby who is 80yrs now has in the recent admitted to decades of philandering, and to giving quaaludes to women as part of an effort to have sex, smashing the image he had built as a moralizing public figure and the upstanding paterfamilias in the wildly popular 1980s and ’90s sitcom “The Cosby Show.” He did not testify in his own defense, avoiding a grilling about those admissions, but he and his lawyers have insisted that his encounter with Ms. Constand was part of a consensual affair, not an assault.

Cosby and his wife, Camille

The verdict has brought about a fall as precipitous as any in show business history and leaves in limbo a large slice of American popular culture from Mr. Cosby’s six-decade career as a comedian and actor. For the last few years, his TV shows, films, and recorded stand-up performances, one-time broadcast staples, have largely been shunned and with the conviction, they are likely to remain so.

At his present retrial in the same courthouse and before the same judge as last summer, a new defense team argued unsuccessfully that Ms. Constand, now 45, was a desperate “con artist” struggling with financial problems and who steadily worked her famous but lonely mark for a lucrative payday.

The prosecution argued that it was Mr. Cosby who had been a deceiver and has been hiding behind his amiable image as America’s Dad to prey on women that he first incapacitated with intoxicants. During closing arguments Tuesday, a special prosecutor, Kristen Gibbons Feden, had told the jury. Cosby faces a maximum of 10 years as well as a fine up to $25,000 on each count. What a bad day for the old man.